Urbanism as a common good
Introduction
The expression urban commons is used to talk about the organization and management of common urban spaces (self-management, shared State-citizenship management), traditional communities of production and care, and emerging communities of knowledge and socialization (citizen laboratories, hacklabs).[1].
“If we consider the urban as the whole of the city, a built physical structure (buildings, streets, infrastructure) and the social life of its citizens (organization, interaction, cultural production, etc.), we could locate the urban commons in an intermediate strip of this amalgam, halfway between the material and the immaterial.”[1].
Historical Context
Origin of the terms common, commons, procomún
The ability to provide essential resources for life (food, shelter, firewood, etc.) collectively, through commonly managed resources, is defined in English as commons, a term related to legal, economic and political concepts – common law, commons good, Commonwealth. However, the multiplicity of meanings contained in the term commons can lead to confusion about the idea to which it refers: whether to a specific common good, to a specific resource, to the idea of being in common or the community that is related to said discourse and the ways of managing it.
According to Ariel Vercelli,[2] throughout history different concepts have also been used to describe goods that have a common character and belong to all the members of a community. Among them, he cites “common property” - communal or communal -, used by Buckles (2000)[3] and Rubinstein (2005),[4] “common resources” (Ostrom, 1990); (Dolsak and Ostrom, 2003),[5] commons (neologism derived from profit and common)[6] (Lafuente, 2007)[7] or common heritage (UNESCO, 1972;[8] Shiva, 1997).
The common and the commons, according to these authors, in addition to meaning natural or man-made communal goods (water, fishing resources, land use, parks, internet, etc.), also indicate the common management practices of collective resources that allow establishing principles of cooperation, exchange and exploitation, far from the market and the bureaucracy of the State.[9].